My father, W.F. “High” Hightower, was a populist. Only, he didn’t know it — didn’t know the word, much less the history or anything about populism’s rich democratic ethos.

But he knew about bankers who regularly squeezed small-business families like ours with usurious interest rates. He knew how rough it was for a local business to fight off deep-pocketed chain stores that use predatory pricing and sledgehammer advertising budgets to seize local markets. And he saw with his very own eyes that the governor and legislature in faraway Austin operated as subsidiaries of Big Oil, the utility monopolies, and the other giants that were allowed to profit by picking the pockets of the general public.…

President Donald Trump picked well-known CNBC personality Larry Kudlow to become director of the National Economic Council, a man with a storied history of being spectacularly and consistently wrong in his economic forecasting.

For starters, Kudlow has proudly proclaimed he’s been an advocate of the gold standard since the 1970s, a favorite proposal of economic cranks the world over. The gold standard just happens to be a terrible way to run amodern economy. Pretty much every respectable economist finds the idea laughable.

Unsurprisingly, a man who holds such a misguided view is pretty bad at making economic predictions.

Trump has chosen television host Larry Kudlow to be his new chief economic adviser. Kudlow doesn’t have an economics degree, but he does have a considerable track record of making woefully wrong economic predictions.

But none of that is an obstacle for Trump, who plans to appoint him to head the National Economic Council. Kudlow is another person Trump has taken to after seeing him on television. In fact, when Trump called Kudlow to offer him the job, he made that explicit.

“You’re looking handsome, Larry,” Trump told him after noting he was seeing his picture on TV.…

State officials will have to inflict illness and death on people whose only crime is having no money -- or as Sarah Palin put it, those who fail the Republican test of “their level of productivity in society.” Those politicians and their appointees who implement the new Medicaid rules will become the real death panels.

Back when the president’s health reform plan first passed, Republicans and their media echoes warned loudly about mythical “death panels” embedded in his legislation. Now, the voters who believed that nonsense are about to meet the real death panel -- led by Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate leader Mitch McConnell, and Rep. Tom Price, the Georgia Republican slated to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

A Reuters/Ipsos national Election Day poll offered some clues to the outcome. It found Clinton underperformed expectations with women, winning their vote by only about 7 percent, similar to Obama when he won re-election in 2012.

NationalMemo Economy: Archive

The existence of the gender pay gap is a well-documented fact. Respected institutions from the Pew Research Center to the Senate Joint Economic Committee confirm that American women make about 77 cents to the average man’s dollar. For women of color, the disparity is even steeper.

Consider that the most common measurement that the media, politicians and corporations use to tell us whether our economy is zooming or sputtering is Wall Street's index of stock prices. The media literally spews out some number every hour indicating that the Dow Jones Average of stock prices is up, down or sluggish — as though everyone is waiting breathlessly for that news.

As if to maximize the possibility of another major financial crisis, the Trump administration and the GOP have recently been busy undercutting the limited safeguards established a decade ago via Dodd-Frank. The latest example of this stealth attack on Wall Street reform is the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, appropriately sponsored by Republican Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

In Wisconsin, which went for Trump by the narrowest of margins, Republican Gov. Scott Walker has warned that tariffs could hurt the state’s canning and beer industries. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has also condemned the looming trade war. And Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) lamented how the White House doesn’t understand today’s global economy.

Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn resigned this week, and Trump bid him farewell by using what amounts to an anti-Semitic slur at a cabinet meeting. Cohn, who did not resign after Trump called Nazis “very fine people,” finally quit this week after Trump announced tariffs that could lead to a trade war.

Republicans are pushing for a bill that would start to roll back the landmark Dodd-Frank legislation that was passed in 2010 to rein in the financial sector after the misbehavior that led to the Great Recession. Now, just about 10 years after the financial crisis that destroyed millions of jobs and devastated the country, Republicans want to weaken Dodd-Frank and unleash some of the banks' worst tendencies.

“Officials insisted there was no single factor behind the departure of Mr. Cohn,” The New York Times reported. Cohn had reportedly been considering quitting as early as August 2017 following Trump’s horrendous response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. Cohn had even penned a resignation letter at that time.

Would you believe that President Donald Trump is eligible for an extra Social Security benefit of around $15,000 a year because of his 11-year-old son, Barron Trump? Well, you should believe it, because it’s true. How can this be? Because under Social Security’s rules, anyone like Trump who is old enough to get retirement benefits and still has a child under 18 can get this supplement...

Trump took to Twitter Saturday to threaten a trade war with the European Union after his proposal to hike tariffs on steel and aluminum was blasted by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and in multiple countries, as well as trade groups, economists, and major U.S. employers.

Trump’s original spending proposal for fiscal year 2019, released last month, included major cuts to not just to the NIH, but the National Science Foundation as well. It is those two publicly funded entities—not Big Pharma—that support the bulk of the country’s basic research into diseases and pathways to new treatments.